


Heaven Raining

by Be_the_Spark



Category: Humans (TV)
Genre: Alternate Finale, Gen, Short One Shot, leotilda-related, non-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 02:31:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15208898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Be_the_Spark/pseuds/Be_the_Spark
Summary: An early prediction for S3E08After Mattie is arrested for causing Day Zero, Laura brings Leo to Dr. Neil Sommer in a desperate yet calculated attempt to free her.





	Heaven Raining

                     

Dusk was fading in. Cloaking all that the sun touched with the colour of crushed forget-me-nots, I thought my eye caught the spark of a falling star as it took in the balcony jutting high above my head. The sight moved the ground under my feet, turning it to air and water until I was dizzied. And, as though by a time machine, I was home.

My mother was in front of me, pointing past my open bedroom window into a world of velvet black sky. Beaming down at me, she said, “Heaven is raining, love. It’s time to make a wish!” Then she scooped me into her arms and carried me outside to the balcony. Her laughter was contagious as the meteor shower soared like fireworks, and I must have wished for what any child would wish from a star. More toys, more sweets. Maybe a unicorn.

“Beatrice!” Strong as a brass bell, my father’s voice echoed from behind us. “Bring him back from the railing, now.” 

Mother gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and turned us back to face him. “Don’t tell him what you wished for, Leo,” she whispered.

 _“Leo.”_ Another voice pulled me to the present. Another mother. One whose daughter I had, in more ways than one, ruined for life. Laura’s furtive glance at me said all of that, as well. When she’d summoned me from amid the power crisis at the railyard, she’d said almost as much.  _“I know what’s going on over there is urgent, but Mattie’s situation is – quite directly – your responsibility. So move it, I’ll give you an address.”_

For sure, she had an admirable way of working a conscience. It must have made her a brilliant lawyer. Not that I’d needed so much convincing, granted – even with Max, Mia, and Sam at low battery life, I was ready to turn myself in for Mattie’s freedom.

But rather than the door to a police station, we were standing in front of one to a mansion.

“Who lives here?” I asked Laura.

“A scientist. I worked with him on the commission.” Her voice was both quick and hushed, like a small deer disappearing into the wood. “He helped engineer Operation Basswood.”

So we were seeking an audience with the man facilitating the murder of my family. My insides pained with a longing, torn between saving them and doing what was right. “I thought we were here for Mattie.”

“We are.”

“Laura, please, just hand me over to Scotland Yard.” I felt hoarse with nerves – with hope, really – to leave before Dr. Death opened his door. “Tell Mattie I’m sorry for everything, and that I want her to be happy. Just let me go.”

Laura Hawkins’s eyes held a shine under the starlight. It was both wary and thoughtful. “Do you love her, Leo?” she asked suddenly.

The words in my head were vanquished by her question. “I what?” I said, sounding as stupid as I felt.

Mattie’s mother sighed. “I said, do you love my daughter?”

I had no answer for her. Did I love Mattie? When there were so many forms of love, what did she even mean? My memories flashed from my childhood to a more recent one, of pleading with Mia to give me the location of her flat. To my surprise, she’d said no, and told me to figure myself out. Figure out what I wanted. As though by divine symmetry, I’d looked up at saw her. A girl who’d been there for me, in a way that few had been lately. And I enjoyed her company too, in a way that I rarely did with anyone. Mattie was my first real friend in this world.

But did I love her?

The door opened, revealing a greying, thin-haired man with a bottle of scotch in his hand. “Laura,” he greeted her while side-eying me, both of us receiving the tone I supposed was reserved for hikers that ran afoul of irritated grizzly bears. “I was sure you wouldn’t be back, now that you’ve got your answers about Basswood.”

“This is about something else, Neil,” Laura told him, and within moments of being ushered inside I had to suppress a wild urge to laugh. Marble countertops, satin curtains, and cherry wood everywhere. What was it with scientists and their lavish homes?

The scientist, Neil, waved an impatient hand at me. “Who is he?”

Before I could speak for myself, Laura said, “This is Leo. He’s a friend of my daughter’s.”

The man raised an eyebrow in realisation. “So this visit has to do with your daughter?” Laura nodded, and the oddest thought struck me at that moment. Neil and I both were learning why Laura had brought me to him at the same time. It could have been…was she expecting a decision from me that even I was not yet planning?

A shadow passed over Neil’s face, and I heard his words before they left his mouth. “I canna do a thing.”

Because he already knew about Mattie.

He half-shrugged, downcast. “Between the news on the telly and Lord Dryden himself calling, I heard about this an hour after she was taken in. Laura, I’m sorry, but you know what this is for me.”

“No,” she said quietly, “I don’t. What is this for you? Justice for losing your son?”

Neil shook his head, his neck taught as he drank from the bottle.

Though I was paying close attention to this interaction, my chest heaved with impatient breaths. What was I doing here? There was only one sure way to help Mattie, and Laura wasn’t letting me do it. Instead we were in a pointless session with a man who blamed my friend for the loss of his son, when it wasn’t even…

_Ah._

I stepped forward, clearing the tickle in my throat. “Hey if you want to punish someone for that, try me.”

Although Neil blinked in surprise, Laura didn’t even cast a glance at me. She knew this was my card to play.

He folded his arms. “So that was your code then?”

More or less, though I wouldn’t say it yet. “Mattie got it from me. We didn’t know…we didn’t mean for any of the tragedy on Day Zero to happen.”

Finally angry, Neil snapped at Laura, “Why’d you bring him here? You should be telling the police, not me.”

I shot him a helpless, wry smile. “My thoughts exactly.”

Now Laura looked annoyed. She held up a “one moment” finger, pushed me to the foyer, and said, “What are you doing?”

I shrugged. “What am I supposed to be doing?”

“Open up to him!” she hissed, her eyes slightly wild with desperation. “Tell him your story.”

I frowned. Give the man who was throwing a lit match on everything I had left to care about an autobiography? Laura was a smart woman, but sometimes she made no sense.

She sighed. “I asked before if you loved Mattie. Do you know why? Because she’s heartbroken, Leo. I don’t think it’s going to make her condition any easier if she never sees you again. Neil’s a behavioural scientist, which means out of everyone we know he’ll have the best chance at figuring out how to keep everyone out of prison.”

Earlier, Max’s duplicitous friend Anatole had nearly bashed my head out, and my face looked like it met a bad day with a razor. But that was nothing to the wind Laura Hawkins had just knocked out of me. Then she threw at my unprepared psyche, “If you tell me that you never want to see her again, I’ll turn you in myself.”

Never see Mattie Hawkins again. Never share the jokes that we had about being friendless, never confide in each other the things that no one else would understand. Never share a cup of tea under a sky of shooting stars.

Did I want that?

I shook my head and marched past Laura into the kitchen. She was just starting to follow as I said to Neil, “My father gave me that code. His name was David Elster, and he created the prototypes for five conscious Synthetics for me.”

Neil squinted at me like I’d just dropped from his ceiling. “Excuse me? David Elster…?”

“Right,” I said, hoping he could keep up before I lost my nerve. “I was traveling with four of the conscious Synths three years ago when we got separated. After my father died, they were all the family I had, and then Mattie brought me one of them. Mia.”

I stopped then because he shot a startled glance at Laura, which meant he’d at least heard about the first Synth to rent a flat in London about as much as the next person.

He wasn’t going to break my momentum, though. “Mattie helped me figure out the code my father had left behind, and when she uploaded it, it wasn’t to create chaos or death. I’m sorry for your loss, truly, but when Mia’s system was crashing Mattie did it to save her. None of us imagined the consequences.”

I looked away from the scientist now, and the lawyer, and imagined it was just me saying this to myself. “But if you need a pound of flesh in the face of all this truth, it should be me. Mattie’s a good person – the best I know, in fact. The guilt of this has been eating at her for a year, and she nearly turned herself in last week for it. But in another year,” I drew a deep breath, finally ready to say it, “she’s going to be a mother. I hope the anger from losing your own child won’t destroy the life of another.”

Neil’s eyes widened at this revelation, and he said to Laura, “Why didn’t you just open with that line?”

Laura smiled at me, tentatively. “I don’t know. I wanted to cover all my bases with you, Dr. Sommers.”

He shook his head, half-marveling, half-outraged. He jabbed a finger at me and said, “Aren’t you dead, lad?”

I raised my eyebrows, not ready to go into that. “I’m not anymore.”

Neil groaned. “What a headache you’ve given me. I’ve finished my scotch. One of you owes me a drink.”

“Will you help us?” asked Laura breathlessly. For someone who was counting on it, she sounded like she could scarcely believe it now.

 “Aye,” said Neil, but his gaze was on me alone. “It all falls to you, Leo. Coming out with this information will alter public perception, Day Zero will be seen as a misguided heroic attempt rather than as a cyber terror attack, and the girl will likely get pardoned. Especially with the child. Yours, innit?”

 I nodded shortly, then repeated, “Likely?”

He scowled. “You like my odds, or the ones stacked against her right now?”

Laura said, “I’ll take it. Thank you Neil.”

But the scientist shook his head. “I’m not doing this for you, Laura. With all due respect, but you lied to me. You’ve used me for information, and you’ve used my loss against me. But your daughter dinna do any of that, and it sounds like if I’m gonna use my heart instead of my head for once, it might as well be for a pair of kids who dinna know any better.”

Truer words were never spoken. Mattie and I hadn’t known any better, and if we had then a lot of terrible things probably wouldn’t have come out of it. But then again, perhaps something good had come out of it too. Earlier, I’d been remembering my parents. A mother who loved me, but couldn’t care for me. A father who could have cared for me if he’d wanted, but couldn’t love me.

And if I had a child, was I really incapable of either caring for or loving it? Is that what I was afraid of? Because if there was one thing of which Anatole reminded me, it was that I wasn’t David Elster. I imagined going back to that balcony of my childhood and knowing my wish. It was the same wish I’d made moments before going into Dr. Neil Sommers’s house.

 Meanwhile, Neil was staring at me. “You know, not to be a downer, but you will have to say goodbye to nearly any form of privacy you’ve ever known. Cameras in your faces twenty-four seven, doling your life story out to jurors, journalists, and random hatemongers alike. There’ll be death threats.”

 _Sounds like fun._ I swallowed and said, “Yes, I understand.”

“Hmm. Mattie must be something precious to you.” Another knowing glance at Laura.

 _Do you love my daughter?_ she’d asked me more than once. Did I love Mattie, my first and only real friend, the one who’d stayed at my side while I was comatose and who’d shared her life with me…who’d shared everything she could with me? Someone who was a far better person than me, and made me wish I was better in return? Did I love the woman who was carrying my child?

 _I’d wished for a family, whole and complete. Don’t be an idiot,_ I thought as I saw her soft-featured face in my mind.

 “I love her very much,” I spoke out, my voice clear, palms unsweaty.

 And as Laura and Neil shared a smile, I knew things were never that simple. Did I love Mattie as a friend, or as family? Or was I madly in love with her? But there were many forms of love, and I didn’t have to pick which category Mattie fell under yet. The best thing that ever happened to me didn’t come from a shooting star. It came from her.  


End file.
